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After work with David Bowie on his last album, Donny McCaslin Quartet pushes forward

New album Beyond Now shows some lingering Bowie influence, says McCaslin, whose group plays Toronto on June 28.

By Mike DohertySpecial to the Star

Mon., June 26, 2017

Most pop artists who decide to sing “jazz” trot out standards and make albums that wouldn’t have startled your great-grandmother. When David Bowie went jazz, he hired a band that would make him turn and face some strange changes. Now that he’s passed away, that band — the Donny McCaslin Quartet, integral to Bowie’s final album, 2016’s Blackstar — is paying tribute by making its own artistic leap.

McCaslin, the California-born, New York-based saxist who’s currently touring Canadian jazz festivals (his quartet will be in Toronto on June 28 as part of the Downtown Jazz Festival), credits Bowie with inspiring the propulsive creativity of the quartet’s new album, Beyond Now. He remembers the Thin White Duke in adoring terms — “He was generous in his humanity, humble, and funny” — but also as an “incredibly smart guy. He could process a lot of information quickly.”

The two met in 2014 when Bowie was mining his new jazz direction by recording the song “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” with the Maria Schneider Orchestra; McCaslin, who has been nominated three times for the wonderfully arcane Grammy Award “Best Improvised Jazz Solo,” soloed throughout the composition, his sax swooning around Bowie’s theatrical vocals.

Impressed, Bowie went to see McCaslin’s genre-hopping band at a small Manhattan jazz club, and decided they’d be able to flesh out the unorthodox music he had in his head.

Bowie proved to be an unorthodox boss, too: Blackstar “was his project, for sure — I don’t mean to at all encroach on his awesomeness,” says McCaslin, laughing, “but it was more like I was the bandleader, with him jumping in and providing all of these songs. He was a conceptualist, and everybody chimed in.

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“He was open to everybody’s input: It was very much a communal thing.”

Jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin poses for a picture at his home in New York City on January 2, 2017. (ANGELA WEISS / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

On Blackstar, Bowie’s vocals sit atop with keyboardist Jason Lindner’s drifting synth pads, bassist Tim Lefebvre’s emphatic grooves, and drummer Mark Guiliana’s jittery rhythms. McCaslin both plays along with Bowie — on the title track, he recalls, “I was just looking at him and listening and trying to envelop his voice in this bed of warmth” — and whirls off into turbulent solos.

All of these elements, sans Bowie, are found on Beyond Now. Its covers don’t treat the rock chameleon’s work with kid gloves: the elegiac “Warszawa” becomes eerie and alien, and “A Small Plot of Land,” which originally sounded like agitated jazz, becomes more of an electronic stomper, abetted by vocalist Jeff Taylor.

The quartet unearths beauty from deadmau5’s “Coelacanth 1,” and the originals, meanwhile, are riveting amalgams of rock, drum’n’bass, electronic weirdness, and other-dimensional jazz. Says McCaslin, “I wanted to capture the same sense of emotional depth that I feel on Blackstar — and that (sense) of us pushing and prodding each other.”

The loss of his new friend and mentor was a devastating blow for McCaslin. “We were certainly going to record more,” he says. Since Blackstar, however, his profile, and that of his bandmates, has risen.

The risk in becoming so associated with a superstar is that one’s own work could be overshadowed — and perhaps it would, if McCaslin weren’t devoted to Bowie’s philosophy of reinvention. For his future, he foresees “something radical . . . not just staying in one place, but moving forward and trying to grow.”

The Donny McCaslin Quartet and Shabaka & The Ancestors play the Concert Hall (formerly the Masonic Hall, at 888 Yonge St.) on June 28. Tickets ($40-$50) available via Ticketpro.

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